


tenses

by fairbanks



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Broken Bones, Canonical Character Death, Fire, Gen, Manipulation, Violence, general Desolation-typical warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-21 18:59:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16582211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairbanks/pseuds/fairbanks
Summary: Sasha is Gertrude's third and final assistant





	tenses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pendrecarc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/gifts).



> big thanks to Amber for betaing this for me and wrestling tenses into making sense. 
> 
> double big thanks to pendrecarc for asking for a gertrude-centric fic because boy oh boy i love that lady

When Gertrude was young, an entirely different being than she is now, she was prone to sentimentality. Not overt, not grand gestures and sweeping metaphors and quiet tears, but small smiles at the plants that found a way to grow between the cracks in concrete. Those sentimentalities were hers, a part of the human condition and a side generally unseen by those around her- those few around her. Gertrude’s life always was sparse that way. She knows now that the great, gruesome Eye in her dreams was drawn to that.

Maybe back when she was sentimental she would look at Elias at his desk and think of how much he’d grown in the years following his ascension to head of the Institute. Perhaps she would think of tough little plants growing where they shouldn’t, or maybe she would mourn the easy humanity he once had, the young man he was when they first met.

Now Gertrude sits across from him and thinks how useful it was for her that the position of head changed while she was already firmly the Archivist. She thinks of how easy it was to manipulate Elias in those very early days, to get away with small, rebellious acts as he found his footing. She thinks, rationally, that it may have been the edge she needed to get as far as she did and maybe save the world from the Eye as well. 

Elias is sharper now, of course, and the tired bits of Gertrude won’t mind at all when his eyes finally shut for good and they’re both free of Seeing and being Seen.

“I understand you have something you wish to discuss with me?” asks Elias, watches sharply as she folds her hands into her lap. She prefers to make him speak first, has found asking him questions is an activity he enjoys far too much- more so his inevitable denial of answers. 

“You hired someone without asking me first,” Gertrude answers, a tone that doesn’t bother to hide a brittle annoyance, as though that’s all Elias could possibly be to her. The tone hits its mark and Elias’ lips thin minutely.

Young still, Elias, she thinks.

“Shall we go over all that needs to be done in the coming months, Gertrude? You’re running yourself ragged, something we cannot afford.” At least Elias drops the play at normalcy. “The Spiral in particular.”

“If I am in need of an assistant I can find one myself,” Gertrude tells him, and when his lips thin this time it is into a smile.

“Then I have no doubt you’ll find a way to make good use of this one.”

-

When Gertrude was young, younger, starting in her position as the Archivist, she had two assistants. In those days she was prone to sentimentality still, largely hidden under her sharp gaze and faintly greying bun. Never a hair out of place, was Gertrude. Her two assistants found it amusing, or annoying, or simply accepted as they all began to do the work required of them.

The old Archivist died horribly, a freak accident as she understood it then. Her paranoia told her the terrible things that bumped in the night, that tore away her sense of safety when she was merely a teenage girl with waves down past her shoulder bones and far too pointy knees. She didn’t know the Archivist was just another monster in the night then.

At first she thought to honor her assistant’s names, remember them as no one else would. At first she mourned them, saw their shadows in cold cups of tea and empty desks, felt vindictive pride when she ended something that hurt them. That killed them.

(That killed them with her help.)

At first she rationalized, clutched to her morality to weather the storm. Even in the days she bothered to remember them as more than ‘her old assistants’ she knew, knew very well, knew she would do it all again. For the greater good, some would say. Not her. For Gertrude it was terrible choice someone had to make, and so she did.

She always did hate waiting for someone to step up.

“It was foolish to imagine Elias would quietly accept my condition of not hiring any more help,” Gertrude tells nothing, though something is always listening. Her tea is cold in her hands but no one is there to take it away and refill it. She never would waste her time on such a minor luxury as warmth. “And I shall make do. This will not happen again.”

It wouldn’t, in the end. Not in her lifetime.

-

The Archives are different in only the faintest ways the next day. There’s a box moved from one corner to another, a desk shifted slightly and cleared, the most comfortable of the chairs moved to accompany it rather than the bulky monstrosity that ( _Eric_ ) used to make its home there. The hotplate they used to make tea on has a pot over it. The air is warmer, touched by a human body passing to and fro.

(A _human_ body. Gertrude’s humanity is buried too deep to warm any air.)

She ignores the signs, catalogues them then moves on to her office. Nothing inside has been touched, thankfully, and it isn’t until far into the morning that a knock interrupts her work.

“Um, hello?” A young woman opens the door, bright eyed and sharp. Gertrude can feel the girl take her in, likely startle over Gertrude’s age. A useful thing, Gertrude’s age. How very, very often people and beasts underestimated her until that last, crucial moment. “You’re Mrs. Robinson.”

“I am. Come in,” Gertrude places her papers down, gestures to a chair across from her desk that is no more comfortable than the floor itself. This girl, Sasha James her papers said, looks at it with a squint but takes a seat regardless. “Gertrude is fine. I understand you’ve been working at the Institute for some time.”

“Oh, yeah- yeah, in Artifact Storage. I was looking for a reason to get out of there, honestly.”

“Why?” Gertrude asks, compels, doesn’t particularly care for the little details but wants a picture of this girl, what she’s capable of (what she’s worth.)

“I don’t- I don’t like it,” Sasha answers, immediate, hands pressed firmly in her lap. Gertrude takes in little features, the way Sasha James holds tension in the straight line of her back, how her eyes strain to glance away but she holds Gertrude’s gaze. Self-taught backbone, and Gertrude makes note of it. “I mean I believe, of course I believe. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe there was something more. There’s enough in Artifact Storage that proves that.”

“And it makes you uneasy?”

“Not that, not the proof, it’s just-” Sasha finally does look away, glances down at her folded hands as Gertrude’s compulsion digs the answer out. “When I’m in Artifact Storage alone sometimes I get this feeling of just how fragile our safeguards are. Surrounded so thoroughly by all this… this _proof_ just sitting behind cabinets and bars and glass, it gets suffocating. I feel like I’m walking through puddles of gasoline with a lit match in hand. One wrong move and-”

Sasha looks back to her, snaps her fingers like a fire rising from a misplaced step. 

“You think you’ll stumble, as it were?” Gertrude asks.

“No, not really. I just need something new. I don’t want to be… trapped.”

Poor girl, Gertrude thinks with flimsy sympathy.

-

Michael Shelley looks through distorted glass and sees a girl with incredible curls spiraling down to her shoulders. For the briefest moment he thinks there’s nothing to her but knives jutting out of her chest like an inverse pincushion, a person made of jagged edges and none of the boundaries that make a person a person. He tells no one, of course, not at first. Jon wouldn’t believe him on word alone.

When they ultimately sit together at a cafe table, Michael Shelley and this sharp edged girl, she pours salt on the table and swirls it in a spiral that never seems to end. “Are you trapped,” she asks him, “If you’re always moving forward?”

“I… yes? If you don’t want to be there,” he tries.

She touches him and her hand feels like nothing at all, even as it raises the hairs on his arm. When he blinks the sharp, jutting core of her pulses like a sack with something terrible inside. “Do you want to save them?”

“Them?” He’s scared and he thinks, _thinks_ she smiles.

“Jonathan Sims. Martin Blackwood. Tim Stoker.”

-

Sasha is excellent at her job. Better than those before her in many ways, the kind of reliable work ethic young, sentimental Gertrude would admire and praise in her quiet way. In another life Sasha could have been like a daughter to her- ha, a granddaughter at this rate. She was younger than Mary’s unfortunate son after all, and like all who ended up in the Archives Sasha James had no one who would miss her. 

It turns out Sasha doesn’t want a grandmother, doesn’t latch on to her that way even when Gertrude plays the card to try and ease Sasha into her confidences. With time and well placed questions Gertrude learns Sasha James is a true rarity, a person led to the Institute and Archives not by trauma and desperation but simply by interest. There is no mark on Sasha’s life, no deep rooted scar from flesh or filth or dark corners. Sasha James was simply interested in the paranormal. Poor, poor girl, Gertrude thinks again.

(“Why her?” Gertrude asks Elias one day, knows better than to compel him and didn’t care for compulsion besides. Between them it was too intimate an act, the hooks of the Eye so deep in Elias the pull of her words would resonate in his soul.

Gertrude is not kind, not compassionate, and most certainly petty when the mood struck.

Like Elias, who smiles at her in the way he always did when he knew something she did not. “You’ve been at this longer than I have, Gertrude. I’m sure you’ll understand, in time.”

Gertrude sighs and turns her back on his probing stare.)

 _What does Sasha James want?_ Gertrude thinks, when motherly regard and praise do nothing to sway her. She feels no ill will from the girl but perhaps Sasha simply doesn’t care for her new boss. That would be messy if Gertrude was ever going to find a proper use for her.

(Her hand shakes and cold tea sloshes in the cup. She stares at it, mute awe. When was the last time she shook? When did she begin thinking of the few people around her in such monstrous ways? When did it become easy?)

“Kind of lonely down here,” Sasha tells her the next day, bringing in a report. Sasha is quite good with technology and better still at using her earnest intensity to divest people of information Gertrude may need to know. “How long have you been working down here without any help?”

“Some would wonder if you’re implying I need it,” Gertrude offers, glances with a quirked brow and a dry twist to her tone. Sasha doesn’t apologize or sputter, offers only an apologetic shrug.

“I’d say it’s less a need and more why wouldn’t you have it? I can’t imagine handling all this by myself.”

“You get used to the ebb and flow of work after long enough. But to answer your question: years, many years now.” Gertrude does not think of the time before that anymore than she needs. “You will as well. There is no more in the budget for further assistants.”

Sasha nods to the lie, a flicker of sympathy in her gaze Gertrude knows she can work with. Poor Gertrude, stuck here alone for so long, working diligently in the basement. Poor Gertrude, with her cold tea and storm grey hair.

“I admit, I appreciate a little life in these halls,” Gertrude says, and it isn’t a lie. Gertrude is lonely, Gertrude is tired, Gertrude lives with ghosts that turn their back on her. She allows that faint vulnerability to show and poor Sasha sees it, lets it pierce through the reservations she may have had.

“Hopefully I’ll be more useful than just a little life,” Sasha tells her, points at her tea cup. “Let me make us a fresh batch.”

“That would be lovely,” Gertrude tells her. There is just enough sentimentality in her to turn her stomach sour as Sasha turns and leaves.

-

The curly haired thing stands behind Michael Shelley. It raises a hand, a nothing that is where a hand should be, and suddenly all the sharp bits are there, poking out of nothing that would be skin. That skin sinks into his and Michael Shelley would scream but there’s nothing there in his throat.

The thing that sometimes looks like a girl tugs and pulls out a worm. It crushes the worm between jagged bits that may, for now, be fingers.

“You’re welcome,” it tells him pleasantly.

-

It’s an unfortunate instinct to flee to the Archives when injured, but sometimes Gertrude cannot escape it. She tries so hard, so damnably hard to separate herself from the power that claimed her, to find no comfort in its gaze or promise in its halls. Yet Gertrude is still human, as planned, still just human enough the ache and blood tug her strings to find the safest place to lick her wounds.

The Archives aren’t the safest place. She knows this, yet here she is.

She sits on the old cot she once used often, during those early days she didn’t see her own leash and believed she could change the outcome of stories for the better. Little Agnes Montague, Gertrude remembers allowing herself to cry in this bed when she'd finally accepted the fight was lost. Sentimental young Gertrude, poor naive Gertrude, who dared to hope.

The Gertrude of now tears her already ruined stockings, takes critical note of the injuries blooming up her leg. Bruising mostly, deep and black, worryingly so. The lower part of her calf is a mess of broken glass and burns. Agnes’ cult would never forgive her for the hand she played in their avatar’s downfall- their downfall. Thankfully they were never very good at setting traps against someone as endlessly paranoid as an Archivist.

Except tonight, of course. Gertrude sighs and lies back, ignores the pain shooting up her leg. She should go to the hospital, get it all clean and set, explain away another baffling set of injuries to doctors who she knows are torn between believing she’s being abused by an incredibly sadistic individual or some kind of assassin in the guise of a dainty old woman. There’s truth in both, she supposes. The Eye is certainly sadistic in nature, and she a killer.

This dawdling won’t do and she knows it, stands with a muffled groan- an indulgence of sound she rarely affords herself. Lord, she’s come so close to being steel, harder than steel, colder and stronger and untouchable. Even if she is not, even if she can never be, she will lie her way to that truth.

Outside the Archives it’s dim, faint morning light on mostly sparse streets. Gertrude considers calling a cab rather than driving and using her aching leg, considers playing helpless old lady to some passerby to have it all done for her to conserve her energy. As she turns to walk towards parking and get to a hospital herself something too warm grabs the back of her shirt and tugs. She’s thrown back by the force, down and onto the pavement of a sidestreet, only barely out of view of the road proper.

“Ran back to the nest?” Jude Perry towers over her, smiles bright. “I had a feeling.”

“Is this really a fight you want to start on the Institute’s doorstep?” Gertrude asks and considers being scared. She should be, Perry would see her burned alive, would see everything she loved burned, if only she loved anything. Maybe Elias is watching, interested to see her worm her way out of this one or perish on his territory. The unfortunate Archivist tendencies in her, the choices that led her here, would love to see what he’d do if she did die.

Perry steps hard on her leg, the ugliest of the cuts and bruising, watches Gertrude grit her teeth in agony but nothing more. It takes Perry twisting her heel for Gertrude to gasp in pain, soft and weak sounds in her throat. She considers screaming but she knows that will only hasten Jude’s inevitable attempt to kill her. Right now she needs time.

“It would be worth it, I think. Look at you, frail old thing, but still won’t scream,” Jude says, always did manage to make threats sound like lovely promises. It makes Gertrude think of Mary and her knife gash of a smile when delighted. “I’ll find something you love and burn it, Gertrude, even if I have to cut off every piece of you one at a time.”

A lot happens at once then, starting with the crunch of Gertrude’s ankle under Jude’s heel and followed by Gertrude’s unfettered shriek. Gertrude’s vision whites out for a moment but when it returns there is Sasha James, smacking Jude Perry hard with what looks like a broken bit of office chair. Ah, from the garbage nearby most likely, Gertrude thinks, with a hazy approval of makeshift weapons in a dire situation.

“Get away from her or- what?” Sasha freezes when she notices Jude’s arm is dented, wax torn away from the attack. Underneath is black and fetid, and poor Sasha James has never seen anything like it, Gertrude knows.

Yet Sasha takes a step between them, stubborn and insistent, a barrier against an enemy she doesn’t understand. An exceptional Archival assistant, really. 

Jude agrees, if her laugh is anything to go by, wild and wheezing. “Oh, a new one? You should have said, Gertrude.”

“Back. Off,” Sasha demands, and the commotion is beginning to bring a crowd from the street by the sound of it. Perfect timing too, because Gertrude knows there is very little keeping Jude from cooking Sasha’s insides where she stands.

Jude retreats with a smile and Sasha kneels by her, says something Gertrude doesn’t quite catch in the fine mist at the corner of her thoughts. She clasps Sasha’s arm, looks up at her and feels a trickle of long dead sentimentality.

“Very good, Sasha.”

The paramedics come after that and Gertrude considers not having to waste her own petrol as close to a victory as she can in these circumstances.

-

Two weeks later Gertrude is in a cast and Sasha comes into work with wide, liquid eyes. She smells of smoke.

“My apartment, it-”

“Burned down?” Gertrude guesses, extends a measure of sympathy to her tone as would be expected for such news. Sasha is startled, looks to her like seeing a ghost, swallows once then twice then clenches her hands into tight fists.

“People died. Families _died._ My neighbors, people I’ve known for years, they just… they’re gone.” Sasha looks lost a moment, looks beyond Gertrude before her gaze sharpens viciously. “How? How did you know?”

Gertrude considers how to answer but it must take too long for poor Sasha James, who stands in a swirl of dust particles and tense lines. “You won’t tell me what happened in that alley, that- woman? Was she a woman? And now I’m the only one who survived, how? I heard the fire alarm and got out but _no one else did_. It’s… it’s impossible.”

“Sit down,” Gertrude offers in a voice now laced in stone. She watches Sasha do just that, helplessly, and from a shelf nearby she hears the tell tale click of a tape recorder.

Gertrude eyes it a moment, sighs through her nose. _Fine, I’ll throw you a bone, as it were._

“Tell me everything Sasha,” she says, and Sasha swallows, nods and doesn’t blink when Gertrude begins, “Statement of Sasha James-”

-

“Go on,” the thing called Sasha tells Jon, brushing a hand that was not even displaced air against his soft, soft arm. “Say your words, Archivist.”

Jon’s breath is a shudder, but he is dutiful like they always, always were. “Statement of Sasha, taken direct from subject on… on-”

“The day you’ll die,” Sasha tells him, gently sharp. “The last moments of your life.”

Jon swallows but doesn’t stop. “Statement begins.”

\- 

Sasha lives at the Archives now. Gertrude knows it is only a temporary measure, that eventually Desolation will devour her and everything she once loved. She can hear Sasha sometimes, taking deep, gulping breaths as if to fight back tears with stubborn tenacity. If Gertrude were sentimental she would be torn apart with guilt, since the message is oh so clear. Sasha is the closest thing Gertrude has to a care in the world, or so Jude Perry thinks. And for that poor Sasha James will suffer.

There’s no point in hiding it any further so Gertrude explains, however vaguely, what the world really is. Sasha is surprisingly quick to accept it, like a puzzle piece snapping into place. She doesn’t turn any ire on Gertrude, a fact that surprises her, and instead insists on as many statements on the Desolation as she can get.

“They aren’t a primary concern right now,” Gertrude tells her, watches as Sasha storms through the stacks. “They’ve already been defanged. This is merely a desperate attempt at revenge.”

“A successful attempt,” Sasha snaps, pauses and breathes through her nose. She doesn’t ask about their primary concern, the numerous statements and trips and deals to learn of the Spiral’s great becoming.

That suits Gertrude fine. Better she be ignorant when the time comes. It will be easier for both of them.

One day she finds Sasha sitting on the cot, head in her hands and heavy breath muffled into her palms. She is crying and Gertrude cannot help but watch for a shocked moment, the incredibly human sound leaking into still, dead air.

“My uncle, he- he died. Fire.”

Gertrude takes a seat beside her, watches Sasha’s shoulders shake as she finally looks up from her palms, red eyes and red faced, smaller in her grief. She chokes a laugh and it’s even more human a sound than her tears. “I didn’t even like him, was a real jackass. I haven’t seen him in years, even though he’s all I really have left. Had left.”

Once upon a time Gertrude was a sentimental young woman, quiet and intense. She reaches to the memory of that long dead girl and lifts a hand, runs it through Sasha’s hair. Her ghost says to Sasha, “I’m sorry, Sasha,” and then poor Sasha crumbles, buries her face against Gertrude’s skirt and cries in her lap.

Gertrude strokes her hair and doesn’t think of the last time anyone touched her without meaning harm. Even Mary always dug her nails into Gertrude’s arm when she leaned close, offered secrets as they passed in the halls. 

Sasha cries and Gertrude knows this little moment will afford her the trust to get Sasha James on _The Tundra_. 

-

“So, she’s the one?” Peter Lukas asks, gestures to Sasha standing on the deck of his great freighter as they prepare to shove off. Once upon a time Gertrude got cold very easily, and now she stands and lets the sharp sea air tear through her core and steal what warmth she has left.

“Yes. You and your men are to leave her alone- something I’m sure a man of your particular talents is perfectly capable of.”

Peter chuckles, smiles in a way that can never and likely has never met his eyes. “She’s all yours. Good luck, yeah?”

She does not see Peter for the rest of the voyage.

-

They’re nearly to their destination, a place that never was and never could be, when she finds Sasha sitting in on the bed in her cabin.

“I’m not coming back from this, am I?”

If Gertrude is steel Sasha is soot, a fire extinguished and leaving only a messy black stain in its wake. She’s twisted debris that is never quite cleared away.

Gertrude steps inside, closes the door behind her and sits on the stool afforded the room. “What do you have left to go back to, Sasha?”

It’s a killing blow and Sasha looks up at her, eyes messy black in the low light. “What will happen to me?”

“You’ll save the world.”

“And if I refuse?”

“The world will end if I can’t find a way to force you.”

Sasha nods, squeezes her eyes shut. Opens them again colder, colder still. “I hate you. You’ve known all along, haven’t you? Lord, you’re… you’re just a monster.”

If Gertrude was sentimental it would sting, but she is not. If Sasha was petty she would refuse and fight but she is not. She steps into the Spiral and Gertrude never sees her again.

-

It’s rather like a movie, Martin thinks, how he steps into the strange room in the tunnels, how he finds a figure slumped in a chair that he turns only to find a corpse. The body is old, rotted, dressed in dowdy skirt and blouse. The hair is grey and there’s a hole between the eyes, so perfect a shot Martin thinks it must be staged. Like a Halloween prop, a bad joke in a series of bad jokes; like worms and women in red dresses scratching at the door. 

He steps back and into something made of jagged corners. When he turns nothing is there.

Martin leaves, has to find his Archivist, and the thing called Sasha stands where it has always been. It has no hands but it reaches, strokes a stray lock of the corpse’s hair. 


End file.
